A Lifetime of Perspective on Wall Street’s Hard Times

Bob Newburger, left, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, his workplace for decades.Credit
Simon Doolittle for The New York Times

During the depths of the Depression, Bob Newburger did what was nearly impossible: He landed a job at a well-known brokerage firm, starting a career that, 74 years later, still has him going to Wall Street almost every day. For today’s job seekers, however, the secret to Mr. Newburger’s job-hunting success in hard times would be hard to replicate. The firm was called Newburger, Henderson & Loeb; his father was the senior partner.

In a lifetime on Wall Street, Mr. Newburger has built a career bookended by two of the country’s worst economic crises. At 95, he has seen the highs and the lows of the market and is in an unusual position to compare today’s crisis with the one in which he started his professional life.

While there are some similarities between the two crises — “Overleveraging,” he declares — Mr. Newburger says the situation is far different from what he experienced during the Depression.

Today, he says, people are uneasy. “It was desperate then,” Mr. Newburger says.

He remembers the faces of gentlemen who sold apples on street corners wearing shabby three-piece suits, their gold watch chains long since pawned.

For his part, Mr. Newburger did quite well. His father persuaded him not to join the family firm after high school so that no one would have to be laid off to make room for him. Mr. Newburger went to college, though he never graduated, and began at the firm in 1935.

He rose through the ranks, becoming, as he says, the “juniorest of junior partners” after three years on the job.

In 1940, he became a floor broker on the New York Stock Exchange for his family’s firm, and aside from a stint in the Army during World War II, he has been there since. He stopped trading in 1995, but still works as executive director of the Alliance of Floor Brokers, an organization for traders. Those who know him say Mr. Newburger brings a valuable sense of perspective.

“When you can have people like Bob reminisce,” says Arthur Cashin, managing director of UBS Financial Services, “you say, ‘Gee, that sounds remarkably like what we’re going through now.’ And it tends to soothe the breast somewhat.”

Mr. Newburger says that the number of traders is down so significantly that “you could shoot a gun off in a lot of places on the floor and not hit anybody.”

While his family’s wealth insulated him from deprivation during the Depression, Mr. Newburger has suffered serious losses from subsequent shifts in the financial markets. About four decades ago, a time when surging trade volume began to stretch the exchange’s capacity beyond its limit, his firm had not automated and was overwhelmed. The firm — by then renamed Newburger, Loeb & Company — made a series of critical blunders with clients’ money, was sued and ultimately collapsed in 1970.

Almost overnight, Mr. Newburger said, he lost “several million dollars,” but he managed to keep two homes that were in his wife’s name.

He started over, and became a broker for a West Virginia company — Hazlett, Burt & Watson — which he represented on the floor of the exchange until 1995.

Mr. Newburger still wears a handkerchief in his jacket pocket and a scarf around his neck. He lives with his wife of 57 years on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Newburger, who says his duties as director are minimal, draws no salary from the Alliance of Floor Brokers. He spends his time working on a memoir — he has filled several notepads — and chatting with his Wall Street friends. Those relationships are one of the things that keep him returning to the stock exchange.

“The New York Stock Exchange is not a cold, heartless organization,” Mr. Newburger says. “It isn’t eighths and quarters or decimal points — it’s people. There are so many people that I love, and that I dare say love me.”

His age, of course, is a favorite topic of conversation with friends. When one colleague, James Maguire of LaBranche & Company, teases him, calling him a contemporary of George Washington, Mr. Newburger is delighted, declaring, “We both have soft false teeth!”

Although he insists that the current crisis has not approached what he saw in the 1930s, there are some disconcerting similarities. One is the increase in foreclosures. Mr. Newburger recalls driving through the Gold Coast of Long Island with his father in the early 1930s and seeing estates being sold by banks for rock-bottom prices.

Mr. Newburger also says that the current recession and the Great Depression share the same underlying cause: “Greed.”

According to Mr. Newburger, before the Depression people could buy $100 of stock with just $10 in cash, “even if you were the bootblack on the corner.”

Those investors, like the people who during the latest real estate boom bought homes that were beyond their reach, were left holding the bag when the bubble burst.